I hope you can join us for our important day-long conference on Friday, May 2: The Color of Citizenship: Legacies of Japanese American Internment from WWII to Stop & Frisk, to be held at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. Note:Roosevelt House is located at 47-49 East 65th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues.

RSVP required - this event is free & open to the public; lunch will be served.

The mass incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II is a powerful but often occluded illustration of the fragility of US citizenship and civil liberties. As such, this event demands frequent reexamination in relation to ongoing conversations regarding post-9/11 special registration, detention, and deportation, as well as long-standing formal and informal practices of profiling and surveillance of communities of color. This daylong conference presents a three-part program examining: 1) the history of the Japanese American incarceration and how it is made meaningful to multiple publics in different locations – higher education, museums, and our national landmarks; 2) artists who deploy this history as relevant to their artistic and political practices in the present; 3) the legal significance of the incarceration to contemporary local and national state policies directed against communities of color.

Keynote address by Norman Y. Mineta, 14th United States Secretary of Transportation

Co-sponsored by the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, The Hunter College Asian American Studies Program, The Hunter College Human Rights Program, and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University